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First 'Malaria-Proof' Mosquito Created
Gisg writes "The University of Arizona team reported that their genetically modified mosquitoes are immune to the malaria-causing parasite, a single-cell organism called Plasmodium. Riehle and his colleagues tested their genetically-altered mosquitoes by feeding them malaria-infested blood. Not even one mosquito became infected with the malaria parasite."
Just wait for the population explosion in (random mammal) once these mosquitoes start taking over.
The malaria parasite is not a bacteria or virus, but could it evolve past this defense? And how would you make this variant of mosquito out-compete the normal, already established ones?
Emotions! In your brain!
more mosquitos.
Setting these mosquitoes up in the wild assumes they will 'take over' the role of existing mosquitoes within the environment. What advantage does being malaria-free have to these mosquitoes? If none, will they survive in the wild? (Or make a big enough dent in the population to matter). Also, what happens when these mosquitoes mate with existing mosquitoes?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Something to REALLY benefit mankind!
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
and... umm... yeah.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
They need to be fitted with lasers on their heads to kill off all the other mosquitos.
As someone who grew up in a fairly mosquito-rich area, I would be happier to see them develop a mosquito with severe blood allergies. Still need them to reproduce, but spread them around and watch the suckers blow up if they grab the wrong type of bloodpop! Or how about a wing frequency that is not so annoying? Or make them afraid of the dark?
I sacrificed myself and RTFA. No need to click on the link - there is no more info than that in the summary.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
" as an unfortunate side-effect the mosquitoes happened to acquire the ability to transmit HIV"
They need to develop cannibal mosquitoes that feed on other mosquitoes.
Wait! I thought it was the humans that got infected with malaria and the mosquitoes were just carriers.
First malaria proof mosquito? I created one years ago.
*splat*
There's another.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
I, for one, welcome our new blood sucking overlords.
Great... just great.
Here's an idea. How about, instead of curing their diseases, we put out efforts instead into eradicating the bastards. It's not like we don't know how to drive a species into extinction. We've done it, or are on the verge of doing it, to many cool species. So why the hell can't we do it to one of the more bastardly unpleasant ones?
Any hippy that objects... let's make them extinct too.
Imagine all the people...
So this means I can keep my old tires out back full of stagnant water again?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
It's a good thing that parasites aren't known to evolve quickly.
Fast-forward 50 years. Natural mosquitoes have been eradicated, replaced by this new genetically modified mosquito. Malaria is wiped off the face of the earth. Two million lives a year are saved. There are rainbows in the sky. Cute puppies and kittens sleep together in every home.
Until some lawyer files a class action lawsuit. Since all mosquitoes are now the genetically modified variety, the researchers and company which developed the buggers and the governments which permitted it are now liable for the pain and suffering associated with every mosquito bite on the planet.
I wonder what unintended consequences this will have? Like causing malaria to mutate into something that can infect these mosquitos, or something bad the mosquitos do.
The plan is to replace the wild mosquitos with the genetically modified but if the wild mosquitos are more fit it probably won't work. Quite an achievement, though. Of course they could now create a super mosquito that is more fit, bites the hell out of us but doesn't pass on malaria. Might be worth it.
Nate
First we find a gene we want expressed.
Next we breed a super mosquito which is much hardier, has better survivability and better mating potential.
Scary, but it actually could be someones thought process.
God spoke to me.
Maybe it's just me, but after reading for seemingly months about some seriously stupid studies being conducted, I finally come across one that seems to be worth every penny we would ever spend on it. Malaria via mosquito is a HUGE problem in certain parts of the world.
It's about time we stopped pissing money away, trying to figure out why water is wet, why alcohol in excess makes you think you can sing, or scientifically proving the whole chicken vs. egg thing (sadly, that last one is an actual study)...
But now the trick is getting these genetically modified mosquitoes to out-compete the unmodified one.
By the way, if this is done Monsanto style, will we be charged a fee if we get bitten by one of these copyrighted patented trademarked proprietary mosquitoes?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
> The University of Arizona team reported that their genetically modified mosquitoes ...
What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.
I wonder where you've been in Mozambique... Costa do Sol doesn't count. I was a contractor in Manica province a couple of years back. I got malaria four times in one year. Every other international I knew contracted malaria. Mozambican colleagues were also infected often. We had treated nets, sprayed pesticides in our facilities, didn't let water stand, etc., etc.
It doesn't work. Maybe you can point to some percentage decrease in an area, but people are still getting and dying from malaria. Relying on individual action (treated nets, spraying own facilities) or an on-going effort organized by the government (a national spraying campaign)... recipe for failure.
I'm not saying we shouldn't take those kinds of actions-- any reduction is good. I'm saying that we should work towards total eradication of malaria. Ending poverty should put the material conditions in place, but maybe GM mosquitoes could help along the way.
How about we a kill a good majority of the dang things instead?
A University of Manitoba researcher appears to be close to a solution that involves releasing sterilized male mosquitoes into the population.
Malaria harms mosquitoes too. An earlier attempt of this concept tried to outcompete factor and found that due to the added immunity the mosquito quickly rose to around 90% after a few generations. In theory, all they need to do is release this mosquito and it should have the immunity gene take over the vast majority of the mosquito population in short order and protect a lot of humans as a consequence.
Also, you can't really evolve past a defense if the wall is instantly 50 feet high. You need some leeway like not taking the full doses of antibiotics or a rather large quasi-species of HIV to have something in the works that kind-of works and then play off that. This makes the mosquitoes rather instantly immune and likely couldn't be evolved around, anymore than a deer could evolve a defense for a high powered sniper rifle that appeared on the scene rather suddenly in evolutionary terms.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
The law of unintended consequences?
Great, we've just made gin and tonic genetically obsolete.
Are they immune to bug spray, too?
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
Has 2 Merlin engines and is made of wood.
In Mozambique 2006, WHO reports:
22 Million Suspected Cases
7 Million Confirmed
19 Thousand Dead
Malaria instance rate went from 20% to 30% from 2001 to 2007
And here's my citation: http://malaria.who.int/wmr2008/MAL2008-CountryProfiles/MAL2008-Mozambique-EN.pdf
As you, yourself, point out, there's no way to do enough analysis.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
These bugs are part of the food chain, remove them and you upset that foodchain.
Better to replace them with an almost similar bug but one that isn't as harmful. You still get stung but you won't die from it.
It is the difference between killing your cat to protect the birds and putting a bell around its neck.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I guess I should do some research before hazarding a guess, though.
The traditional techniques basically used the closest thing we have to a published API for the systems. And not all of the results there were exactly benign.
The new techniques are not even using "unpublished" APIs. They are basically digging into the code inside the modules and cutting and pasting, and the only documentation we have is very limited partial documentation gained by reverse-engineering.
Look, mosquitoes DO bring up virus and bacteria. HOWEVER, they are also bringing us (and other animals), virus from other species. Now, we know a number of these virus are species selective, but only because we are looking for them. Why? Because they produce disease.
The problem is that I am certain that there are virus that move genes across species. IOW, it is the lowly mosquito that not only causes arthopod borne disease, but also has a great deal to do with evolution. The fact is that we see high evolution rates where there are a large number of species. When the species diversity dies out, so does evolution. Yet, evolution should actually increase.
Far more than a company owning your food (which they will not), you should fear the wiping out of our species due to stopping evolution, and seeing us adjust to new pressures.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not exactly.
A lot of the permutation paths are trimmed by natural selection, so, indeed, we could make mutations that would be impossible in nature, even given a steady state universe and suns that never go nova.
If you aren't convinced there are such things as trimmed selection paths, you still have to consider the limits of time. How many clocks does it run a single 128 bit counter through a full count? How fast is the counter going to have to run to complete the count during the amount of time a planet like our earth is in a mode conducive to our type of life?
The problem of evolving us as a species is dramatically helped by concurrency, because of natural selection.
The problem of evolving a specific genetic permutation is only made worse by the implications of concurrency.
Please, avoid all products from Arizona!
I am sure this anti-malaria thing is somehow racist! How dare those bigot pigs in Arizona try to thwart God's will! People who live in malarial zones are all natural, and their environment should not be altered. Not by crops that grow or bugs that don't carry natural diseases.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The fool is you. At this point we can change 1000 times faster. The third-order effect of mosquitoes is nothing compared to the genetic engineering techniques we already have.
Unfortunately, Monsanto already patented those techniques...
As a guy who grew up in a developing tropical country with mosquitoes biting constantly, driving me nuts and giving me their own version of ADD - I think this effort is pointless. First of all, malaria is one of the many diseases mosquitoes carry. I never got malaria, but my family members did. Malaria killed hundreds every year, until late twentieth century. People around died with mosquito-carried diseases, like cerebral malaria, encephalitis, and they continue to die or get disabled by diseases like filaria. I am a biotech scientist, now living in the US, living relatively comfortably. Making malaria-proof mosquitoes is such a pointless exercise, that I can't even figure where to begin. It would be much better to eliminate mosquitoes (or drastically reduce their populations near human habitats), not because they are annoying. And no personal vendetta here either. They are vectors for dozens of other diseases, and decrease the quality of life (to the point of misery) to millions of people. Yes, yes, the ecological impact. Given the amount of tinkering producing a malaria-free mosquito is, and given our massive environmental impact just with our industrialized and agriculture-based existence, eliminating mosquitoes is not a big deal. I remember reading an ecological balance argument against eliminating small pox, much like this one. I mean really, come on. There are far more significant and better ways to conserve biodiversity and ecological balance.
Invoking evolutionary time doesn't help. Actually, it's similar to your Churchill anecdote in some respects.
Leaving aside the historicity, there are a lot of questions begged by your story, and I'm going to ask you to walk through some of them with me.
What is the intent of the story?
If it is not apocryphal, what was Churchill's intent?
How was the woman raised? What are her circumstances? I'm personally of the opinion that women should not sell themselves for any price, but I am not particularly anxious to insult a woman just because she sees a difference between a million pounds and five. And there is a difference in many contexts.
If you absolutely insist on getting laid, five pounds will get you laid in some neighborhoods, 500 pounds will get you laid in others, etc., and in some places it takes a marriage contract.
For example, clock a byte register through all it's possible values. That's fast. Now do it randomly. It will probably take a bit longer, true? But if you have a statistically random sequence generator, it will probably not take too much time. Probably, if the generator has true statistical randomness.
How many effective bits are there in a mosquito's genes?
That's that part that's similar to your anecdote. You are assuming, when you invoke random permutation as if there were no time limits and as if mutation were the same as permutation, that five is as good as a million.
With only 59 effective bits, even at a strictly linear count with one permutation a second, you exceed the expected life of the solar system.
Now, I know you're going to claim that this is not the same problem, that we are picking relatively small strings in the genetic sequence, and that the changes are neither sequential counting nor random. But you are not asserting nature mimicking us, you are asserting coincidence between the processes.
Now that you're thinking, remember that nature works in parallel, but remember also that there is a selection involved. Some of the random stuff gets suppressed before it actually goes live, so we are not talking full permutation. And we don't have docs to tell us which combinations will be suppressed. Well, we can calculate some of the suppressed stuff, but we really don't have enough evidence to be sure of the calcuations that we can do.
The assumption that all possible permutations of a gene sequence will occur eventually is not equivalent to the assumption that all possible mutations will occur, okay?
By the way, remember that nature lopped off the dinosaurs.
Are you realy okay with saying, effectively, that it ought to be okay with everyone if our genetic experiments end up lopping humans off the evolutionary tree a little early? Is a million years not too early for you? How about five years?
Wrong. Monsanto has very little GE patents in the scopes of things. In addition, the last thing that we want to do is apply any GE changes to Humans by unnatural selection. And the approaches that we have to evolve a critter is slow compared to what nature does. She uses 10's or possible 100's of virus in each mosquito bite to evolve us. The problem is, that with our approach to mosquitoes, it is a guarantee that we will not change to adopt to new diseases. Monstanto is absolutely nothing, when Nature is (was) pushing GE all over the planet.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's not as if malaria is even dangerous to the mosquito.
If you're going to create a super-mosquito, why not make it immune to something that will actually give it some edge, like insecticide? ... :P
In addition to my long tirade above, I'll point out what I've pointed it out elsewhere, the question is not where the genetic patterns came from. It's that we are moving from engineering through the interfaces that nature most commonly uses (breeding) to actually getting into the low-level code, and we still don't have a complete set of documents for any of the systems we are playing with.
It's kind of like script kiddies graduating from playing with VB to playing with the kernel and they have only a partial, reverse-engineered manual. And if the kernel panics, it's the system we are trying to live in that does something we probably didn't want it to.
We want to experiment if we want a good manual, but we want to do it carefully, not on a schedule determined arbitrarlily by some greedy board of directors.
Defeat a high powered sniper rifle is no different that defeating wolf's teeth: it would be prohibitively expensive to defend against them directly, so it's all about avoidance. This mean, stealth and detection of predators (including humans). And for that, deer are equipped moderately well -- and evolution _will_ make them better at spotting hidden humans pretty soon. Just give it time, hunting rifles are a quite new invention.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
So we replace the regular malaria infested mosquitoes with a mosquito that would only carry enhanced resistant malaria?
As long as they were at it, it would have been nice if they could have bred them to really not like the taste of human blood too.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
haven't these people learned anything from creating killer bees, who knows what else if different about these mosquito's
or maybe it is there goal to genetically enhance all insects until they kill us
but maybe GM mosquitoes could help along the way
GM mosquitoes won't help one bit. They'll all break down within a year.
I say we go with Honda mosquitoes.
Once these are bred in large numbers they can be released and will push the normal mosquitoes out by sheer numbers. If we are really lucky and this is a dominant gene, we can release them and they will gradually spread the trait through the wild population.
The limiting characteristic is dominance of the gene, without it the malaria strain can be reduced but not eliminated in the wild. The intent to place the gene in the wild is mentioned in the Arizona Republic article, and by the BBC.
Ya now they are infected with Rage instead.
Way to go, now I have to go buy a cricket bat somewhere...
Grab your mit! You just got called up to the Big Leagues!
When I buy tuna, I have the choice of buying dolphin friendly tuna. When I buy eggs, I have the choice of buying free-range eggs. When I buy beef, I have the choice of buying organic beef. So, when it comes to bread and breakfast cereal, why doesn't anyone label it as genetically modified? This stuff is supposed to cure world hunger, combat malnourishment, fight disease and turn desert into fertile land. But genetic companies don't want to put this on the label. Why is that?
Do they still itch when they bite you? They do? FAIL!!!!
The big question is whether the offspring of these mosquitoes will keep the same traits when bred with non "Malaria-Proof" mosquitoes. If not, this experiment is pretty useless. If so, future generations of mosquitoes won't be able to carry malaria (which is the leading cause of lethality in those infected with AIDS and kills an average of around 2 million people/year). Another question to be answered is whether these mosquitoes will carry other infectious diseases more than other mosquitoes.
While we're at it, can we please genetically modify mosquitoes to _not_ sting...